Jean-Phillipe Cointet

The opinion of people on different issues of public debate has been traditionally studied with polls and surveys. More recently, network ideological scaling methods have shown that digital traces in social media platforms can be used to mine opinions at massive scales. With this class of methods, social media users are embedded in a latent ideological space. In this talk, I will discuss how the dimensions of this emergent space relate to classical attitudes in political science: trade protectionism, immigration, European integration, etc. Such variables measured through traditional surveys in various countries can be propagated to Twitter users to estimate their distribution on social network. I will further illustrate the interest of such embeddings beyond opinion estimation for media studies (fake news propagation) and collective action analysis (yellow vests movement).